Hugh van Cutsem

Hugh van Cutsem, who has died aged 72, was a passionate conservationist,
countryman and horse-breeder, and a long-time friend and confidant of the
Prince of Wales.

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Hugh van CutsemPhoto: MARTIN POPE

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The van Cutsems' house at Hilborough in NorfolkPhoto: MARTIN POPE

7:42PM BST 03 Sep 2013

Son of the champion trainer and millionaire bloodstock breeder Bernard van Cutsem, Hugh van Cutsem was one of the finest shots in the country. His 4,400-acre estate on Norfolk’s Brecklands is known for the excellence of its private wild game shoots, and he also owned a hunting lodge and grouse moor on the North Yorkshire-Cumbria border.

A popular man in country sports and conservation circles, van Cutsem was a founding member of the Countryside Movement; an assiduous fundraiser for the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust; chairman of the Countryside Business Trust; and possibly the only pro-field sports candidate elected to the council of the National Trust after it introduced its ban on stag-hunting.

His methods of managing his land — so that game birds proliferate in a habitat teeming with their favourite diet of grubs, insects and seeds, while enjoying protection from foxes, stoats and crows — had remarkable results, including a recovery in the population of English partridge and a boom in the population of the stone curlew, one of Europe’s rarest birds. In 2001 he had 35 pairs of the birds on his Norfolk estate. “Properly managed shooting is the most vital conservation tool,” van Cutsem explained to The Daily Telegraph’s Elizabeth Grice. “I love shooting. It is part of the fabric of the countryside. You draw together a marvellous collection of people in a day’s shooting.”

For several years the van Cutsems (Hugh and his Dutch-born wife Emilie) were Sandringham neighbours of the Royal family as leaseholders of Anmer Hall (a 10-bedroom Georgian property that was earmarked earlier this year as a country bolt-hole for the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and their son, Prince George). After the lease expired, the van Cutsems moved into a magnificent new neo-Palladian country house on their own estate at Hilborough, near Swaffham, built in the Norfolk flint-and-brick vernacular and designed by Francis Johnson — from a rudimentary drawing by van Cutsem.

From the time when Prince Charles was up at Cambridge, Hugh van Cutsem became a regular holiday and shooting companion, sharing the Prince’s passions for rural life, field sports and conservation. Yet he and his wife kept such a low profile that their influence on first one and then another generation of future monarchs was often overlooked.

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When the Prince married Lady Diana Spencer, the van Cutsems’ eight-year-old son Edward, the Prince’s godson, was one of their two pageboys. Then in 1992, at the time of the publication of Andrew Morton’s book, Diana: Her True Story (on which the Princess had secretly collaborated), the van Cutsems, according to Prince Charles’s biographer Jonathan Dimbleby, were said to have “felt compelled to tell both the Queen and Prince Philip how stoical they thought their son had been through the long trauma of his marriage”. Until then the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh had not taken sides, but after that the Duke is said to have written sympathetically to his son and there were the first discussions about potential separation.

More importantly, as their parents’ marriage broke down, the two young princes, William and Harry, spent so much time in the care of the van Cutsems that Mrs van Cutsem became seen by some as a “substitute mother” to the boys. The couple’s four sons, William, Edward, Hugh and Nicholas, became close friends of the princes; indeed, many people felt that it was in large part thanks to the van Cutsems that the two boys were able to enjoy something approaching a normal, carefree childhood.

Hugh Bernard Edward van Cutsem was born on July 21 1941, the son of Bernard van Cutsem, of Northmore Farm, Exning, Newmarket, and his first wife, Mary Compton. The van Cutsems were Roman Catholics of Flemish origin who had moved to Britain in the 19th century.

After leaving Ampleforth, Hugh van Cutsem served as an officer in the Life Guards and then as an investment manager at Hambro’s, before setting up his own firm. Later he bought a data storage business and also developed a number of other business interests.

Van Cutsem inherited his family’s stud and estate near Newmarket on his father’s death in 1976. He sold the estate in the 1990s after buying the Hilborough estate, where he transferred the stud farm. In 1994 he won a Country Landowners’ Association award for the restoration of a dilapidated brick and flint barn whose architectural style became the “signature” of his stud. Prince Charles presented the award.

The van Cutsems were regular worshippers at the Roman Catholic church in Swaffham, and van Cutsem was appointed a Knight of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta in 1993. Next to his new house he also built a private chapel to be used for family services and by visiting priests.

He married, in 1971, Emilie van Ufford, who survives him with their four sons.